British scientists have taken the first step towards building a real-life version of Deep Thought, the supercomputer programmed to solve the “ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The team has drawn up the first blueprint for a giant quantum computer, a device capable of rapidly solving problems that would take an ordinary computer billions of years to answer. The ground-breaking modular design could theoretically pave the way to a machine as large as a football field with undreamed of levels of computing power. University of Sussex researchers plan to unveil a proof-of-concept early prototype within two years. While Deep Thought’s solution to the meaning of life was “42”, the Sussex scientists hope their creation will prove a lot more useful than the supercomputer in Douglas Adams’s comic space novel. Quantum computers, which harness weird effects influencing the nature of reality at the subatomic level, have the potential to unravel the deepest cosmological mysteries, create life-saving medicines, transform weather forecasting, and take encryption to new levels. Until now, quantum computing has largely been a theoretical concept with enormous potential but little in the way of practical development. The new design idea, described in the journal Science Advances, is seen as a game changer because it allows connection speeds between individual quantum computing modules 100,000 times faster than any previously envisaged. Professor Winfried Hensinger, head of the Ion Quantum Technology Group at the University of Sussex, said, “For many years, people said that it was completely impossible to construct an actual quantum computer. With our work we have not only shown that it can be done, but now we are delivering a nuts and bolts construction plan to build an actual large-scale machine.”